Center for Teaching Assistant Director Jeff Johnston and Associate Professor of Physics Vicki Greene discuss ways to assess student learning in a faculty working group on course design.
Photo by Daniel Dubois

by Joan Brasher
It goes without saying that in an academic environment, professors teach and students learn. Or does it? How do instructors know for sure that (or what) their students are learning? Which teaching methods work best to lead students to that desired knowledge? What kinds of experiments pursued by those teaching at Vanderbilt might be useful to colleagues in other disciplines?

These are the kinds of questions explored at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, founded in 1986 to serve and support excellence in teaching within the College of Arts and Science. Since 1997, the scope of the Calhoun Hall-based center has expanded to include all schools and departments on campus. In addition, the center’s initial focus on the instruction of international teaching assistants has broadened to involve Vanderbilt’s entire teaching community, from junior faculty to medical residents to seasoned professors to post-docs.

These changes may be credited largely to the hard work of Center Director Allison Pingree, who came from Harvard University’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in the summer of 1998, and her colleagues. Reaching beyond the Center’s original scope to all of Vanderbilt’s colleges and schools was Pingree’s first order of business, and since 1998 the center’s programs, staff and offerings have grown substantially. More recently, Pingree modified the organizational structure of the center when she hired new colleagues who could serve as liaisons to the university’s main disciplines.

Peter Felten, who joined the center in 1999, is liaison to the social sciences as well as the Owen Graduate School of Management, Peabody College and certain areas of the Medical School. As associate director, he oversees the planning and evaluation of all the center’s programs and workshops, as well as its support of grant projects across campus. For several years Felten has co-facilitated faculty seminars on service-learning, as well as sessions for professional faculty teaching undergraduate courses. This spring he is organizing the visit to Vanderbilt of Roy Rosenzweig, the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, professor of cultural studies and director of the Center on History and New Media at George Mason University.

Two newer colleagues help to flesh out the disciplinary picture. Assistant Director Jeff Johnston links to the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, the School of Nursing and some areas in the School of Medicine. Beyond overseeing the center’s Future Faculty Preparation Program (F2P2), Johnston offers programs in his liaison areas, including sessions on technology and teaching, feedback in the clinical setting and engaging students in large lecture courses. This spring, Johnston is organizing a series of events related to teaching in the sciences in conjunction with the visit of Stanford’s Robyn Wright Dunbar (see sidebar).

Assistant Director Patricia Armstrong, who most recently served at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton, is liaison to humanities areas in the College of Arts and Science, as well as the Blair School of Music, the Divinity School and the Law School. In addition to overseeing the International Teaching Assistant Program (ITAP) at the center, Armstrong facilitates workshops on a range of topics, such as teaching portfolios, syllabus design and fostering critical thinking. She is launching a three-part series this spring on current and emergent technologies for teaching a foreign language.

Last summer the center welcomed a new program coordinator, Carolyn Miller, who earned a master’s in higher education administration from Peabody and who works closely with Armstrong in ITAP, as well as coordinating the administrative aspects of all of the center’s programs.

“One of the things that I’ve really tried to focus on since coming to Vanderbilt is connecting within and across academic boundaries,” Pingree said. “We want departments and schools from all over the university to look to the center and say, ‘The people there know my language; they understand how I think about teaching.’”

In other words, Pingree said, the center strives to support what Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, calls “pedagogical content knowledge” – the need not only to understand one’s subject area and some general teaching principles, but the particularities and challenges of teaching and learning within specific disciplines and topic areas.

The services and events offered by the center aim to support this view, and range from individual consultations to larger group settings for dialogue, analysis and reflection. There are workshops, lectures and seminars to attend, as well as the option to set up class observations, video tapings and student focus groups – all designed to identify what approaches work best for particular courses and contexts. These individual consultation services are confidential and non-evaluative and are available to all members of the Vanderbilt teaching community, including full- and part-time faculty and teaching assistants.

“As an institution of higher education, Vanderbilt creates and disseminates knowledge, so teaching and learning are fundamental components of that scholarly process,” Pingree said. “We have a variety of programs and services that enable people to move through the steps of inquiry and design, experimentation and implementation, and assessment and reflection, all with the goal of more profound understandings of students’ learning and of the teaching that prompts it.”

Keivan Stassun, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, learned about the effective use of technology at the Center for Teaching, which he says has enhanced his classroom teaching.

“Through participation in CFT workshops and seminars, I have learned how to implement Personal Response System (PRS) ‘clickers’ for gauging whether students are understanding the material in real time,” he said. “More importantly, the CFT has connected me to a community of colleagues all around the university who view teaching as a scholarly endeavor.”

Pingree and her senior staff regularly teach departmental courses within their respective disciplines, in addition to conducting seminars and consultations. “In order to be fresh and have an authentic connection with the learning communities that are in place at Vanderbilt, it is important for us to teach in our own disciplines and not just offer workshops,” Pingree said. “We want to think carefully and frequently as practitioners about the contours, demands and benefits of our own teaching and of our students’ learning.”

Pingree said she thinks of the center’s staff as a group of community-builders – “consummate matchmakers, connecting colleagues with others pursuing similar pedagogical issues and interests.” One of the ways the center has done this most effectively is through faculty working groups on course design, started in the summer of 2003. Meeting for four sessions in small clusters, faculty pursue such questions as: What do I want my students to learn? How do I know if and what they’ve learned? How should I construct individual class sessions and then the course overall, to enable them to show evidence of their learning?

Faculty in these working groups – nearly 40 so far, from six schools and 26 departments – consistently have given high marks to the experience, so much so that the center is now planning a group for graduate students in the spring. One participant described the “major re-design” of his course as a shift from “… the old ‘what material did I want to cover’ approach, to ‘what I wanted the students to learn.’”

Instead of serving as a place to “cure teaching ills,” Pingree said that the center views teaching as ever-evolving. “Over time, there is more of an understanding that teaching is an ongoing and rigorous intellectual activity and we are all in this process together. What we are seeing are communities of faculty and grad students coming together to experiment with their teaching and to learn from each other.”

Such a process, Pingree said, reflects the view of Shulman and others that, like all scholarly work, teaching and learning are “community property” – vital components that both shape and are shaped by the disciplinary fields in which they emerge.

Center for Teaching: A Spring 2005 Sampler

Making Sense of Student Course Evaluations
Mozghan Mirani, graduate teaching fellow, Center for Teaching
Wed., Jan. 19, 4:10-5 p.m.

Future Faculty Preparation Program (F2P2) Spring Orientation
Jeff Johnston, assistant director; Katharine Baker, Lisa Battaglia, Mozhgan Mirani and Forrest Perry, graduate teaching fellows, Center for Teaching
Fri., Jan. 21, 4:10-5 p.m.

Missing: Class in the Classroom
Sherry Linkon, professor of English and American studies and co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University
Fri., Jan. 28, 2:30-4 p.m.

Graduate Student Teaching Event for Professional Development (GradSTEP) 2005:
Technology in Teaching and Learning
Sat., Jan. 29, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.

Residential Colleges
Lucius Outlaw, associate provost of undergraduate education; Howard Sandler, professor of psychology and human development; Casey Leonetti, graduate student in mathematics
Mon., Feb. 7, 3-4:15 p.m.

Teaching Gender and Sexuality
Monica Casper, director of women’s and gender studies and associate professor of sociology; Brad Lane, graduate student in teaching and learning; John Sloop, associate professor of communication studies
Wed., Feb. 16, 3-4:15 p.m.

Personal Response Systems
Jeff Johnston, assistant director, Center for Teaching; Jonathan Blake, academic technology consultant, Center for Teaching and Office of Innovation Through Technology
Mon., Feb. 21, 4:10-5:30 p.m.

What Research Tells Us About Science Learning
Robyn Wright Dunbar, senior associate director for science and engineering, Stanford Center for Teaching and learning and associate professor, geological and environmental sciences
Wed., March 23, 4:10-5:30 p.m.

For more information or to register for the Center for Teaching’s programs, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/cft

Posted 1/10/05